Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 29))

PHOTO-SECESSION EXHIBITIONS

MONOTYPES BY EUGENE HIGGINS
ON November twenty-fourth the fifth season of the Photo-Secession
Gallery was opened with an exhibition of drawings and monotypes
by an American artist, Eugene Higgins. Mr. Higgins, during the
years spent in Paris, has assimilated a great deal of the European point of view
and appears to see with much the same eye as Daumier or Millet. His interest
lies mostly in the silhouettes of figures moving or resting in dim lighted streets
or interiors, his composition being one of spotting, of the play of dark and
light masses, and some of his monotypes have all the rich quality of a good
platinum print.
It is to be regretted that this powerful talent should usually dwell on sub-
jects of far-away lands instead of oftener reflecting some of the aspects of the
life of New York in the midst of which he is living.
LITHOGRAPHS BY TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
Nothing could be more different from the Higgins monotypes than the
lithographs of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec which succeeded the former exhibi-
tion. Most of his subjects belong unmistakably to the lower Parisian social
order. Yet they are pictured so sympathetically as to be in no way offensive.
His sketches show all the elements of intelligent selection of line, generalizing
each individual with remarkably few touches of pencil into a type of its class.
His line, however, has more than this stenographic rendering of character which
we would find in the big caricaturists. It is a vibrant line more nervously
alive if possible than Whistler’s, and each sketch is admirable, besides its merits
as a character study, by its sensitive arrangement of lines and the perfect
balance of the spotting. The catalogue of this exhibition is herewith reprinted :
“Only one artist capable of grasping all that Degas possessed remained
in the vicinity of the great prototype. This was Lautrec, a painter who, under
more favorable conditions and with a longer term of life, might have greatly
surpassed his exemplar.
But women interested him more than all the rest. He made them into poetry
when he was not using them for fresco-drama. Daumier scarcely observed
woman at all, or treated her with scant courtesy. In Lautrec’s lithographs she
becomes the Don Quixote of a fantastic epic, in which the very subordinate
male part is occasionally played by Sancho Pansa. Sometimes he draws
her slim and slender, a ghostly lathlike figure. Yvette, Lender and Jeanne
Avril were his born types; He sketched the hallucination of the consumptive
demirep, which take life and substance from exhaustion; he sought the gro-
tesque in all the ironies of cosmopolis, the mixture of the petty and gigantic
peculiar to Paris, the colossal absurdity of a remnant of the ancient form of
culture in the midst of a new world sharply opposed to it, the folly of a tradi-
tional gesture to express the unutterable wants of the day.
Lautrec dared to do what Degas scorned, . . . He belonged to a new

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